'Censorship Voldemort,' R.I.P.

Why did so many people hate Susan Wojcicki?

The text message came from a friend: “Vaccine induced turbo cancer?” It included a link to the notice that former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was dead.

What did this message mean? Quick research determined that the cause of Wojcicki’s death at age 56 was lung cancer, which her husband said was first diagnosed in 2022:

Wojcicki – who was one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley – had been involved with YouTube’s parent company Google from its earliest days, when its two founders worked out of her garage in California to build a search engine. ...

Wojcicki had served as YouTube’s CEO for nine years before announcing last year in a blog post that she would be “stepping back” from her leadership role to focus on her family, health and personal projects that she was passionate about, CNN previously reported.

She oversaw YouTube during the web’s pivotal transition toward social media, but also as online platforms came under increasing scrutiny for spreading misinformation, hate speech and other harmful content.

“I’m so proud of everything we’ve achieved,” Wojcicki wrote when announcing she was stepping down in 2023. “It’s been exhilarating, meaningful, and all-consuming.”

The ancient Latin adage, De mortuis nil nisi bonum (“Speak no ill of the dead”) is wise advice, but anyone who searched social media for Susan Wojcicki’s name on Saturday morning could discover how widely disregarded this advice was in her case. Many thousands of people were expressing their happiness that Wojcicki was dead, as she had been identified as “Censorship Voldermort” for her suppression of dissenting viewpoints on YouTube, especially in regard to the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you consult Wikipedia, you will discover that Plandemic is a series of three videos, the first of which was released online in May 2000:

Plandemic is a trilogy of conspiracy theory films produced by Mikki Willis, promoting misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. They feature Judy Mikovits, a discredited American researcher and prominent anti-vaccine activist. ...

Upon its release, the first video went viral, becoming one of the most widespread pieces of COVID-19 misinformation, its popularity most attributed to online word-of-mouth. It was quickly removed by multiple online platforms, but this failed to stop its proliferation. The video also plausibly contributed to non-compliance with health protocols. 

OMG, “non-compliance with health protocols”? How dare they?

Permit me here to make two important points: (1) I am not “anti-vaccine,” and (2) most critics of COVID-19 vaccines are not generally “anti-vaccine,” either. Getting your kids vaccinated against measles, diptheria, polio, etc. — that’s one thing, and the questions raised about COVID-19 vaccines are something else altogether. I neither know anything about Judy Mikovits nor care to learn anything about her, because such information is of no relevance to the observable fact that the COVID-19 vaccines failed to prevent people from getting sick with the virus. Many of the most prominent advocates of the COVID-19 vaccine — Joe Biden perhaps most prominent of all — have nonetheless come down with the disease. So if it didn’t protect against the virus, what the hell good was it? I got vaccinated, and was never diagnosed with COVID-19, but I figure that has more to do with my robust immune system than anything else.

So, we are told, Judy Mikovits is “discredited” and the Plandemic video promoted “misinformation,” and Susan Wojcicki was proud that YouTube censored it:

[Liza Dwoskin, Washington Post]: You know, even though I think you guys have really gotten a lot better at stopping some of the abuse and misinformation, there are still some big stories that slipped through the cracks and, most recently, there was the video … called "Plandemic" that you know, shot up--shot up on YouTube. It was a video, as you're familiar, you know, that alleged that Dr. Fauci had a role in spreading the virus and that masks don't--like, masks actually spread coronavirus, and all sorts of misinformation.

So, how did that video become one of the top trending videos on YouTube?

MS. WOJCICKI: Yeah, so, we have definitely updated our policy many times since the COVID-19 crisis hit. I think we implemented more than ten different policies. And it definitely is a policy violation. I can go through to say, for example, the virus doesn't exist or that you can take any kind of unsubstantiated cures that have not been verified. And so, Plandemic was a video that was violative of our policies. We did remove it. But what happened is there were a large number of people who reuploaded that video and they tried a whole variety of different techniques, whether it was speeding it up or slowing it down or putting it in a frame or changing it in a whole bunch of ways. And it just took some time for our systems to be able to catch that all. We use a combination of people and machines, and we were able to ultimately bring all of those copies down, but there was a moment in time where there was just a challenge in our enforcement. But it was never an issue with policy. It always was a violation of our policies.

You see that YouTube’s CEO, like the many-eyed Argus, was ever vigilant in protecting the public from “misinformation” which, in the case of COVID-19, might be defined simply as anything that Anthony Fauci didn’t want you to see.

In other realms on controversy, “misinformation” might be defined differently, but still quite simply, e.g., anything that is disapproved of by the Democratic Party officials.

Speaking of conspiracy theories …

‘The Right Side of History’

Has everyone forgotten how we got here? Am I the only one who still remembers that the obsession with “misinformation” began in 2016, when Hillary Clinton claimed that “Russian interference” with the election was why she lost to Donald Trump.

Did she really believe that? It doesn’t matter, because the claim that Trump was involved with “Russian collusion”became the basis for a witch-hunt climate that included (but certainly was not limited to) the Big Tech operations of Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc. Elon Musk bought Twitter (now rebranded as X) with the explicit intent of ending the censorship regime at that platform, and has aided Matt Taibbi and others in exposing the shenanigans involved in that censorship, and the important thing to note is how Hillary Clinton’s Russia-focused paranoia gave rise to this mania for deplatforming, demonetizing and otherwise suppressing dissent.

During her 2016 campaign, Hillary spoke of the “need to make sure America remains on the right side of history.” This expressed the self-righteous certainty that liberals have about their own moral and intellectual superiority to others; to disagree with them is to be on the wrong side of history, doomed to ignominy. Because only villains could ever vote against her — such was the implicit meaning of her rhetoric — it was fair game, in her thinking, to allege that her opponents were traitors, secretly in league with foreign enemies. Trump was Putin’s willing accomplice, and those who voted for Trump were “deplorables,” deserving of nothing but contempt.

And so, when the campaign for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination got underway in 2019, Hillary Clinton did not hesitate to suggest that Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, then a candidate in the Democratic primary, was a Russian asset.

Such irresponsible rhetoric was (and still is) symptomatic of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Ever since The Donald took that escalator ride in June 2015 to enter the presidential campaign, a certain segment of the population has become completely unhinged, and the fear of “disinformation” is part of that lunatic disorder.

This has happened at a time (perhaps not coincidentally) when the credibility of the establishment media has suffered a catastrophic decline. So on the one hand, you have a vast audience of people who don’t believe anything they read in the New York Times or see on the major network news, and on the other hand you have group of so-called elites (in media, politics, academia, etc.) determined to suppress alternative media.

Therefore, to be pro-censorship, is to be “on the right side of history,” as Susan Wojcick seemed to suggest in her 2020 interview with the Washington Post:

MS. DWOSKIN: Susan, I'm really excited for this conversation on many levels. First, it's the moment--you know, this is, like, a year of really seismic changes in our society. We're in the midst of a global pandemic, it's a consequential presidential election, and the country is protesting for racial justice. And all of these are issues where social media plays a huge role. And then, also personally, I feel like I have followed your journey as a reporter, almost, like, four years ago to the current moment, when, going into the last election, I think social media companies were really taken aback by the scale of Russian meddling and misinformation surging up on the platforms, including yours.

And today, when I report on a company--you know, we're still going to call you out for your problems, but it's a more mature company, it's a different company.

MS. WOJCICKI: Definitely. It's been a historic year by any measurement. And I don't think any of us could have foreseen how many changes that we would all be grappling with and challenges.

And you know, since 2016, we've made tremendous changes at YouTube. So, you know, we have been really focused on what we call responsibility, and all the different products and policy and changes that we need to make as a result of that. And I think, you know, while there's still work to do and there will always be work to do, we've come a long way.

And you know, I'd be happy to talk about any questions you have on that front, but it's been really important for me. This is a very--of course, a very uncharted area for everybody. So, I just want to make sure always that, as we're making decisions that I'm thinking about things in terms of being on the right side of history. It might be hard right now, but how will we think about it in the future, and how can I make sure that YouTube is on the right side of history.

But what if “the right side of history” is wrong? What if the “misinformation” you’re rigorously suppressing turns out to be true? Much of the skepticism about COVID-19 policies has been vindicated by history. Mandatory masking and shutdowns of schools and businesses were ineffective and/or unnecessary in terms of preventing the spread of the disease which nearly everyone now acknowledges did indeed come from the lab in Wuhan, China, which was conducting research funded in part by the U.S. government — to cite just the biggest “misinformation” that turned out to be true.

When the official “experts” are proven to be so wrong about so many things, is it any wonder that people are willing to engage in the wildest speculation?

My friend, the one who texted me news of Susan Wojcicki’s death Saturday morning, is part of the alternative media, and has done battle with YouTube censorship, particularly in regard to COVID-19. His remark about Wojcicki’s death — “Vaccine induced turbo cancer?” —reflects what Wikipedia calls a conspiracy theory:

Turbo cancer is an anti-vaccination conspiracy theory alleging that people vaccinated against COVID-19, especially with mRNA vaccines, are suffering from a high incidence of fast-developing cancers. Although the idea has been spread by a number of vaccine opponents, including several health professionals, turbo cancer is not supported by cancer research, and there is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccination causes or worsens cancer.

Let me be clear — I am agnostic about this. Maybe there is some kind of link between cancer cases and the mRNA vaccines, or maybe not. I simply don’t know, but you’re not going to convince me it’s impossible, just by labeling it a “conspiracy theory.”

The Arithmetic of Risk

Here’s something I know about risk — it’s always a matter of arithmetic. If you tell me, for example, that mRNA vaccines have been proven 99.9% safe, what you’re actually telling me is, one in 1,000 patients will suffer serious side effects. And if you’re going to administer such vaccines to many millions of people, simple multiplication tells you that there will be a thousand “bad” cases for every million of patients who get the vaccine. How many people in America got dosed with mRNA vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic? If it was 150 million, and the risk of serious side effects was 0.1%, then that’s 150,000 people harmed by the vaccine.

My point is that two things can be simultaneously true: (1) the COVID-19 vaccines inflicted no serious harm on the vast majority of patients who got vaccinated against the virus, and (2) there are many thousands of people who suffered serious side effects of the vaccines,including hundreds who died as a result of getting vaccinated. You don’t need any expertise in epidemiology to ujnderstand this; it’s just simple math.

OK, so it is probably just a coincidence that pro-vaccine fanatic Susan Wojcicki died of lung cancer at age 56, a little more than three years after the COVID vaccines became available. For my friend to suggest that it was “turbo cancer” is not justified by any available evidence, and it’s probably impolite even to discuss it.

But is it wrong? Well, I can’t say that for certain, and neither can you. Logic requires that we reserve judgment when encountering the unknown, and mRNA vaccines are so new that potential side effects are definitely in the realm of the unknown.

Now let me cite to you the strongest possible argument against censorship:

“[T]ruth is great and will prevail if left to herself. … [Truth] is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”

– Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

Susan Wojcicki wanted to believe she was on “the right side of history,” but she was on the wrong side of liberty. She was an opponent of free speech, and more confident than she should have been about what constitutes “misinformation.”

Probably this had nothing to do with her dying from cancer. Probably.

It is a certain fact, however, that many people are not mourning her death.